Run on Guns : Three years after the L.A. riots shook suburbia out of its sense of security, sale of weapons among ordinary citizens continues to rise throughout the county.

Until April 29, 1992, Simi Valley was an anonymous suburban sanctuary far removed from the perils of Los Angeles. Then came the Rodney King trial’s controversial not-guilty verdicts, which ignited the Los Angeles riots and put Simi Valley on the national map, not necessarily a good thing.

To those who were outraged by the verdicts, Simi Valley--by virtue of hosting the trial--became an overnight symbol for racial injustice. And when threatening phone calls were received at Simi’s City Hall, a feeling of anxiety and vulnerability spread through the community. Safety and security no longer taken for granted, residents who had never even locked their doors at night took protective measures.

Jackie Simpson bought a gun--the first one she had ever owned.

“I heard people saying, ‘We’ll burn Simi Valley,’ ” Simpson said. “I was frightened.”

Simpson, 32, was among hundreds of ordinary people in Simi Valley and Ventura County who armed themselves because of the riots. According to state figures, 7,570 handguns were sold in the county in 1993, up 34% from 1991, the year before the riots. Judy Cotter, owner of Hilldale Sales, a large Simi Valley gun shop, described the buyers as middle-class people “terrified that the have-nots (were) going to take what they have away from them.”

The arming of private citizens hasn’t abated in the nearly three years since the riots. Fueled by nightly TV news images of violence and crime, by a realization that the police may not be there when you need them and by the perception that criminals are better armed than the Marines, sales of handguns continue to rise, county gun shop owners say.

Simi Valley Councilwoman Sandi Webb not only owns a handgun, she packs one in her purse--illegally. Webb, a victim of rape several years ago in San Bernardino, recently revealed she carried the concealed weapon on trips into Los Angeles.

While debate rages over whether a handgun at home decreases or actually increases your risk (see sidebar), the county’s run on guns reflects a growing national concern over crime. According to a Los Angeles Times Poll last year, 43% of Americans put crime issues at the top of the list of the country’s most important problems, more than double the percentage from 1993.

With a U.S. Department of Justice study predicting that 75% of American women will face criminal attack in their lifetime, it’s no wonder more women than ever are buying guns. In a 1994 American Firearms Industry dealer survey, 19% of the dealers reported a significant increase in female customers over the last five years, the majority of them buying handguns for self-defense.

The trend is mirrored in Ventura County. “I’d say 60% of those who take our classes are women,” said Ryan Clark, manager of Ventura Pistol Range. “That’s just the opposite of what it used to be.”

3 SHOTS IN THE TARGET

On a windy winter day recently, Dawn Lindley of Fillmore placed her Colt .45 and 5,000 rounds of ammunition in her yellow Ford Fiesta and headed to Wes Thompson’s Piru Rifle Range for a few hours of practice. Bumping down a dirt road, the 33-year-old housewife maneuvered past bored calves and yawning potholes before reaching one of several gun ranges in the 1,500-acre wilderness enclave.

Lindley was joined by John McClain of Ventura, a part-time shooting instructor who has been training her for the last few months in combat-style sport-shooting. Not that she’s learning to storm the shores of Tripoli. What combat shooting provides--aside from teaching a shooter to handle a weapon--is the opportunity to practice realistic homeowner-vs.-intruder scenarios.

“A defensive situation is pretty much a combat situation,” McClain said.

A stocky, amiable man with a flattop and mustache, McClain has taught several dozen shooters over the past six years, charging between $10 and $20 an hour. He thinks women are “naturally better shooters than men--they have better hand-eye coordination and they don’t have a Wyatt Earp attitude.”

At the range, Lindley strapped on a black leather holster, a Christmas gift from her husband, Fred. She slammed an eight-shot magazine into the .45’s grip and wrapped her right hand around the wood stock, which Fred had customized to accommodate her small fingers.

Wearing ear mufflers and goggles, she stood behind a mock wooden door frame about 30 feet away from a cardboard silhouette of a man: the armed intruder coming down the hallway. Holding the gun with both hands, Lindley edged into the doorway, drew a steely eyed bead and pumped three shots through the middle of the target.

In real life, she would have first told the intruder to stop, barking out the order in a loud, authoritative voice the way she’s been trained. And with a .45 pointed at his chest, the intruder wouldn’t have too many options.

“He is going to have to surrender,” McClain said, “or nine times out of 10 he’ll run the other way.”

Which would be fine with Lindley. “You let him keep going--you don’t shoot him in the back,” she said. “All you care about is that he left your home. He’s outta there.”

McClain, 33, emphasizes gun safety and likes to train his students by “stressing them out,” making them hit several targets in a limited amount of time. The drill helps them learn to stay calm under pressure. In practice, it works.

At the range, Lindley advanced on three “pepper poppers,” hinged steel targets that keeled over when she pinged .45 slugs into them. Then she knelt behind a steel drum--a “bed” in a simulated bedroom drill--and put a hole through a cardboard target.

But how would she react in an actual shootout with a breathing, dangerous, unpredictable criminal? “If someone is breaking into your house,” she said, “you’re highly stressed. I’d be nervous, adrenaline flowing, and I wouldn’t be as accurate.”

Which is why she favors the .45, famous for its stopping power. “It isn’t a ladylike gun,” she said, but the intruder “will know he’s been winged.”

The plain-spoken Lindley, mother of a 10-year-old boy, isn’t a gunslinging vigilante, just an average citizen who shoots for fun, self-assurance and a sense of security.

The training, she said, “teaches you to think. I’m confident I can defend myself if I have to, but I can’t stress enough: I really don’t want to shoot someone. That is a last-resort thing.”

IT CARESSES YOUR HAND

You want to buy a handgun for home protection.

But your parents never owned a weapon. Neither did your brothers and sisters. You never even fired a gun, except for a .22 rifle at summer camp--so long ago you can’t remember if you were a good or a bad shot. You know nothing about guns except that they can kill.

You search the Yellow Pages, finding fewer than a dozen gun shops in the county. Only Shooters Paradise in Oxnard has a combination sales shop and indoor shooting range, where you can test a gun before you buy. That sounds like a good idea.

A squat building recognizable by the Wild West mural facing Oxnard Boulevard, Shooters Paradise is a Guns ‘R Us for weapons enthusiasts. Glass cases chock full of gleaming handguns and knives. Walls adorned with exotic rifles. Book racks stocked with such provocative titles as “Armed & Female.” Hanging in the air is a faint smell of gunpowder and a muted whop-whop from the adjoining firing range, which you can see from the shop through thick glass windows.

A wall poster has photos of Hillary and Bill Clinton above the words “dual air bags.” The President, a clerk tells you, is not very popular among gun owners for last fall signing the federal crime bill, which restricted the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic weapons.

Several customers browse. A father with his boy. An older couple wearing matching baseball jackets. A young woman and her boyfriend. It could have been Saturday afternoon at the Broadway, except these salesmen are wearing side-arms.

“We get everybody in here from military personnel and migrant field workers to doctors and lawyers from Malibu and Santa Monica,” says store manager Andy Dickson. “College students from UCSB even come with dates and make a night of it. One kid brought his prom date here in a limo.”

You flag down a salesman, Big John Knittle, and tell him you want something small enough to put under your pillow at night. He rolls his eyes, knowing a novice when he sees one. Then he removes a hand-sized silver-plated gun from a case.

“This Beretta is better than other small guns, but .25s are not practical for home defense,” he says. “They’re harder to shoot and take more skill to learn.”

Knittle recommends the five-shot Taurus .38 Special for $275 plus tax and $15 registration fee. You heft the stainless-steel revolver with the two-inch barrel and hardwood grip, feeling the power in your hand. You cock the trigger, sight down the stubby barrel and fire off an imaginary round.

“It’s an easy, very reliable firearm to shoot,” Knittle says. “I recommended the stainless steel over the carbon steel, especially if you live by the water.”

You ask to see the top-of-line handgun. Knittle shows you a Sig Sauer semi-automatic pistol with polymer grip, aircraft aluminum frame, steel barrel and steel slide. Costs $1,000. Available in .40 caliber, 9mm or .45 caliber. Preferred by law enforcement, military and professional security personnel.

You lift the expensive, machine-crafted gun, and it caresses your hand. Balanced, cool to the touch, the Sig Sauer means business, but it has a few gizmos on the side, things to remember to push or pull when you want the gun to be ready to fire. The .38 is simpler.

“If a gun doesn’t feel comfortable in the store, it won’t feel good at home,” Knittle says, explaining that the store’s return policy is similar to an auto dealership’s: Once a gun leaves the store, it depreciates in value, and “we can’t give you what you paid for it.”

Walking through padded double doors, you enter the firing range, where gunshots erupt like a string of firecrackers and powerful exhaust fans remove potentially harmful smoke and lead particles. Store regulations require ear and eye protectors and prohibit shooters from firing faster than one round a second and from using hollow- and soft-point bullets.

About half the 14 lanes are in use. George Stedman, a military police officer at the Channel Islands Air National Guard Base, is watching his son, Nick, shred a bull’s-eye from 20 feet with a sleek 9mm Sig Sauer semi-automatic. Nick, 9, learned to shoot three years ago.

“The first thing I taught him was safety,” Stedman says. “If you teach them at an early age, you can have a gun around the house. Nick knows the rules, and he’s a damn good shot.”

After Nick reels in the riddled cardboard target, his father asks him to list the cardinal rules of gun safety. The fourth-grader rattles them off with a machine-gun delivery: “Never shoot behind anybody or point a gun at anybody or if a friend pulls out a gun from behind the bed, start running and don’t try to take the gun away from him.”

You test-fire a Taurus .38 Special. Both hands wrapped around the wooden grip, elbows resting on a bridge, you point at the target and gently squeeze the trigger, animating the cold steel, which belches fire and makes a sharp pop like the crack of a whip. The projectile pierces the target about where it was intended and continues on through a self-sealing rubber panel before ending its flight against a steel backdrop.

Back in the shop, you talk to Dickson, the manager. He takes a pragmatic approach to selling a gun for home defense: The buyer has to be willing to use the weapon.

“If you come in here and tell me, ‘I can’t kill anyone,’ or ‘I’ll shoot him in the knees,’ I’m not going to sell you a gun,” Dickson says. “Pepper spray or a stun gun, maybe, but not a gun.”

In California, you have to be over 21 with a valid driver license and no police record to buy a handgun, and you must wait 15 days to take possession. No real training is required: Purchasers need only watch a two-hour video. At Shooters Paradise, a 10-hour instructional course (about $50) is optional but highly recommended both by store personnel and by police.

“It’s foolish to buy a handgun without taking lessons,” says Lt. Pat Miller of the Ventura Police Department. “It’s like jumping in a car without having driver training and going 90 miles an hour. You have no basis to know what to expect or how to handle yourself, and you’re just asking for trouble.”

And it’s trouble you’re trying to avoid.

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Where and When to Open Fire

Owning a gun is one thing. Practicing with it is another.

Target shooting is banned at all state parks and severely restricted in Los Padres National Forest. And suburban sprawl has shrunk the open space where target shooters could once shoot with impunity.

Several firing ranges and gun clubs are open to the public, including the only indoor range in Ventura County, Oxnard’s Shooters Paradise, which plans to open a Simi Valley operation this spring.

CLUBS AND RANGES

* Ojai Valley Gun Club--Rose Valley; membership: $75 initiation fee; annual dues $35 single adult, $50 family; public can pay $5 on the fourth Saturday of every month for target shooting. Call 649-4558.

* Shooters Paradise--1910 Sunkist Circle, Oxnard; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sundays. Membership: $18 a year and $6 per day lane rental or $99 a year flat rate; $10 a day non-members. Call 483-5359.

* Ventura Pistol Range--Grant Park; 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays; 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and weekends; $5 a day adults, $3 16 and under. Call 648-4968.

* Wes Thompson’s Piru Rifle Range--Two miles north of Piru off Piru Lake Road; 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays; $7 a day. Call 521-1177.